The Darling and Other Stories eBook

She shut her eyes and kissed him passionately on the
lips, and for a long while, a full minute, could not
take her lips away, though she knew it was unseemly,
that he might be thinking the worse of her, that a
servant might come in.

“Oh, how you torture me!” she repeated.

When half an hour later, having got all that he wanted,
he was sitting at lunch in the dining-room, she was
kneeling before him, gazing greedily into his face,
and he told her that she was like a little dog waiting
for a bit of ham to be thrown to it. Then he sat
her on his knee, and dancing her up and down like a
child, hummed:

“Tara-raboom-dee-ay. . . . Tara-raboom-dee-ay.”
And when he was getting ready to go she asked him
in a passionate whisper:

“When? To-day? Where?” And held
out both hands to his mouth as though she wanted to
seize his answer in them.

“To-day it will hardly be convenient,”
he said after a minute’s thought. “To-morrow,
perhaps.”

And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went
to the nunnery to see Olga, but there she was told
that Olga was reading the psalter somewhere over the
dead. From the nunnery she went to her father’s
and found that he, too, was out. Then she took
another sledge and drove aimlessly about the streets
till evening. And for some reason she kept thinking
of the aunt whose eyes were red with crying, and who
could find no peace anywhere.

And at night they drove out again with three horses
to a restaurant out of town and listened to the gipsies.
And driving back past the nunnery again, Sofya Lvovna
thought of Olga, and she felt aghast at the thought
that for the girls and women of her class there was
no solution but to go on driving about and telling
lies, or going into a nunnery to mortify the flesh.
. . . And next day she met her lover, and again
Sofya Lvovna drove about the town alone in a hired
sledge thinking about her aunt.

A week later Volodya threw her over. And after
that life went on as before, uninteresting, miserable,
and sometimes even agonising. The Colonel and
Volodya spent hours playing billiards and picquet,
Rita told anecdotes in the same languid, tasteless
way, and Sofya Lvovna went about alone in hired sledges
and kept begging her husband to take her for a good
drive with three horses.

Going almost every day to the nunnery, she wearied
Olga, complaining of her unbearable misery, weeping,
and feeling as she did so that she brought with her
into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby.
And Olga repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson
learnt by rote, that all this was of no consequence,
that it would all pass and God would forgive her.